It is 1915, and Miranda Gray is spending the war on the other side of the Atlantic to her Canadian husband. Staying with her eccentric relatives and young son at her family's stately home, Star Cross, Miranda struggles to find her wartime role. Is she the stoic wife of a distant military man, the duty-bound nurse, the promiscuous society hostess, reluctant muse to a pacifist poet, a mother, a sister, a daughter, or some amalgamation of all? Gradually, as the war brings death and destruction to those closest to her, Miranda is offered a glimpse of something beyond these stilted roles a chance at real love.

The Spring House artfully balances humour and devastation; at once a deftly written psychological portrait and a social document revealing the slow birth of the twentieth century and the new woman.